Number of the Month

June 2009

Thought for the day

By The
Revd Dr
Seymour
Trend

I expect that you, like me, often wonder why The Great
Creator made the itchiest part of the human body also the least accessible.
Well, nothing in creation is accidental. Everything has its purpose. What is
revealed to us is related to what we are able to understand.

It is what we New Theologians call the Divine Dilemma. How
can the deity reveal unto His people that which they are as yet unable to
comprehend? For example, Moses might have come down from the mountain with a
tablet upon which was inscribed “Exactly one year before the start of the
third millennium flying machines will fall out of the sky because they had
forgotten the date.” The children of
Israel
would have said “Come off it, Moses, you are having us on.” Millennium
would have meant nothing to them, as the event that triggered the first one was
yet to occur, while the idea of a machine, let alone a flying one, would have
been incomprehensible. If Moses had blown his credibility in such a way, the
history of the world would be very different.

Indeed, in those days, the transport system was wholly
dependent on asses: so different from our own time.

So it was with the greatest sin of all. If one of the
tablets had borne the inscription “Thou shalt not emit carbon dioxide” it
would have received a similar abrupt dismissal. Such miracles as the periodic
table of the elements would not be revealed for thousands of years to come. The
greatest revelation would have to wait for the propitious moment.

We are born in sin. Our first action at birth is to inhale,
but our second is to emit pollution.

And God created Gore, that His people should know that they
are cursed with original sin and must repent, otherwise their cities would be
destroyed by floods of boiling water. And The Almighty looked on the works of
Gore and saw that they were good and He rewarded him with great riches, undreamt
by ordinary mortals. But lesser men were envious and challenged the revelation
with specious arguments, encouraging mankind to continue to walk in the pathways
of sin. So the New Theology was born and men of Good Will came together that the
people should know of the works of Gore. It was equally important, however, that
the siren voices of the unbelievers, peddling their so-called science, were
silenced. The religious establishment, with its experience in the concepts of
blasphemy and proscription, is uniquely qualified to achieve this ideal. Clergy
and preachers of all denominations are in a powerful position to ensure that
only the Truth is spread among the people, but many of them are backward looking
and preoccupied with obsolete religious ideals.

So there is much to do but, meanwhile, remember when you
feel that itch and before you reach for that back-scratcher, it might be God’s
way of telling you to think about your carbon footprint.

04/06/09

A
wander from the sex war to climate politics

Your bending author has been thinking about women lately
(as you do). This was precipitated by the shock of being cited in a
review of a feminist tract, though the connection is not clear. It induced
an urge to stick ones head in the lioness’s mouth.

In the days of yore, when children were free to control
their own play, the boys inevitably played competitive, spontaneous and slightly
violent games; while the girls played cooperative and traditional rhyming games.
Boys needed discipline, challenge and competition, which the education system
gave them. Now, at last, a few commentators have begun
to notice something we have often remarked in
these pages, that a great part of a generation of boys have been alienated
by a politically-controlled education system that is hostile to their needs.
Some just drift away, while others turn to armed gangs to give them some
identification. They have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
What was presented as a fairer
balance of the sexes has turned out to be quite the reverse. The waste of talent
ought to be regarded as a disastrous scandal, but it is welcomed in some
establishment circles.

The key phrase in the current battle in the war of the
sexes is Testosterone
fuelled and, of course, once a campaign has started, repetition
becomes inevitable. Males of most species are cursed with the politically
incorrect urge for competition, which is an aid to survival by selection. The
political war for “equality” aims to remove any such natural tendencies. The
current arena is the rather banal BBC pseudo-quizzes, in which establishment
(i.e. that used to be alternative) comedians, who are challenged to be witty
about current events, have the temerity to treat them as competitions. Perhaps
this is the last stand of maleness. In vast tracts of human intellectual
activity the contribution of men is shrinking. They are permitted to earn their
living as footballers or other occupations suited to their Neanderthal nature,
but not as, for example, doctors.

It seems that in this new world women have become a
majority, for example, among newspaper columnists. Some of them are difficult to
follow for someone old and set in his ways. For example, many of them seem to
adopt an unfamiliar dialect of the English language (in which, for example, big
becomes a verb and ask becomes a
noun). The best of them are superb, but the worst are appalling.

First an example of fine writing and acute observation: in
the Sunday Times, of all places, Libby
Purves traces just what has gone wrong with British, and now American,
politics.

At the other end of the scale is the ineluctable Poly
Toynbee, the spokesperson for the New Left axis (the BBC, the Guardian and New
Labour). In the early hours of Monday morning she seemed to be the permanency in
the changing row of opinionated figures involved in the BBCs coverage of the
elections to the impotent EU Parliament. She was incensed that right wing
fascists had achieved representation (as opposed to the left wing fascists who
rule us anonymously from the secretive bureaux in
Brussels
). That is what happens when the political elite ignore the opinions and welfare
of large tracts of the population (and then adopt a particularly fatuous version
of proportional representation). At one point she delivered a tirade against
“gypsy baiters, gay bashers, fascist sympathisers and (slight
pause for dramatic effect) climate deniers.” According to John Ferguson,
writing in CCNET, she recited the same litany on the BBC programme Any
Questions. To group hundreds of eminent scientists with a gang of political
thugs is a glaring example of the ad
hominem tactics used by the New Left. Climate politics has become a proxy
for wealth redistribution and heaven help anyone who tries to intrude science
into the argument.

There is a sham election, after which power still resides
with a secretive unelected elite, then a few days later the same thing happens
in
Iran
.

Funny old world!

16/06/09

Resistance
is futile

Further
to the above remarks on elections, it is clear that Iranians and Britons are
jointly suffering from the delusion that they live in a democracy. In both
countries laws are made by a secretive, unelected cabal. Perhaps the Iranians
have more chance that someone will listen to them. We must hope so.

In the case of
Britain
nobody is listening. At least the Daily
Mail has tuned
in to popular opinion. The invasion of your bending author’s small garden
by giant offensive religious icons was
pictured earlier. It has not only deprived us of valuable storage space, but
has forced us into the grinding sacrificial ritual of recycling.
Britain
is rich in landfill sites, but under the one-size-fits-all policies it has to
conform to the requirements of countries like the
Netherlands
, which have none at all. Just to enforce the religious context a ludicrous
scare is raised, based on methane as a greenhouse gas.

The people may revolt as much as they like, but there is no
one in a position to respond. Unelected local council officials, earning
salaries that dwarf those of MPs are able to ignore elected councillors and deal
directly with the even wealthier unelected officials in
Brussels
. Parliament does not come into it, as it has surrendered its powers and
responsibilities without our consent.

There is nothing new to us oldies in recycling. In post war
years we had street collectors giving their familiar cries of “Any old iron”
and “Rag and bone”. Tottenham, where your bending author grew up, was known
for three things, a football club, a limerick and a pudding. Tottenham Pudding
was pig food, created from the food scrapings collected from our households.
When we had spent a day fishing on the river Lea, the vile smell of it clung to
our clothes.

In those days it was a necessity, now it is a meaningless
religious sacrificial ritual and an indication that for officialdom our time has
no value.

Of course, like most modern bureaucratic impositions, it
bears hardest on those who are least able to cope with them. Not only do they
have the problem of shunting the bins and bringing out the right one on the
right day, but on bin days the disabled and mothers of young children have to
stay at home, because the pavements are blocked.

PS the
Limerick
was:

There was a young lady of Tottenham,
Who’d no manners or she’d forgotten ‘em.
At tea at the vicar’s
She tore off her knickers
Because as she said she felt hot in ‘em.

At last your bending author is able to contemplate
retirement. Correspondents and members of our
forum have remarked that Number Watch
is to be replaced by an official body. No less a luminary than Nigel Hawkes has
announced it in The Times.
Remember Hawkes? He was the one we granted the sobriquet of Nigel (thousands to
die) Hawkes, first back in February 2003,
after his template headline. Our Nige is a
director of the new body, so that’s all right.

The
USA
is beginning to savour in full the benefits of life under socialist government.
It is expensive and wasteful. So it is no surprise that a breathtakingly
mendacious climate report has been issued
with fanfares by the Obama government (or, indeed, by one of those coincidences
that seem to haunt the field, a supporting
one from a British Government source). The capacity to ignore objective
evidence of falling global temperatures, in contradiction to years of forecasts
in the other direction, is quite remarkable and only sustained by The Censorship
in the media.

If Americans wish for a foretaste of what they are in for
they only have to look at the career of Gordon Brown. Can it really be over six
years since our poet penned his
prophetic eulogy? Everything he does is at great expense to the populace,
for example his endless game of musical
chairs in Departments of Government. His very vocabulary is built on
deception – he never spends, he invests.
He has borrowed money at an ever increasing rate, but the worst of it is the
future commitments he has taken on behalf of our grand children. There are hire
purchase agreements (in code – private finance initiative) and, perhaps worst
of all, the gold-plate pensions given to his ever growing army of bureaucrats,
who develop the complexities that he so loves but blight the lives of ordinary
people. He is still in denial about the public spending cuts that the next
government, whatever its complexions, is bound to have to implement. Otherwise
the world will simply stop lending money to the national equivalent of a drunken
spendthrift father who has reduced his family to penury.

First let us deal with the inevitable question that comes
up when one addresses this topic – what makes you think you are qualified to
criticise computer models?

Your bending author:

Started
digital computer modelling in about 1960 on the first digital computer
delivered in the
UK
for academic research, after wasting a year on an analogue computer. The
machine was a Ferranti
Pegasus, which had considerably less computing power than a modern
hand-held device. Indeed, the computer you are using to read this almost
certainly has more computing power than the whole world had then.

In
the subsequent forty years, reviewed hundreds of computer models – in
undergraduate reports, PhD theses and, as a consultant, in industrial
applications.

Most computer models are nonsense. This does not include
those used by engineers in designing airplanes, bridges etc., which are based on
detailed experiments on the systems involved and tested in a variety of real
conditions before being used.

The reason they are nonsense is that they tend to be based
on guesses of the value of coefficients assumed, particularly and disastrously feedback
coefficients. There are few, however, that are quite as bad as climate models,
where the physics of the interactions between variables and parameters is
virtually unknown to mankind.

So, in inevitable synchrony with the issue of the Obama
Government’s excuses for draconian taxation, we have the
UK
media filled with dire predictions. The
Times, The
Telegraph and, of course, the
BBC gave copious coverage, with many supplementary articles. The source is
the Met Office, one of the running jokes in the few pubs remaining after the New
Labour revolution. Not only have they got the annual forecast grotesquely wrong
two years running (having forecast great heat, presumably on religious grounds)
but they are not very good at telling us what the weather is going to do
tomorrow. Their third attempt at predicting a “barbecue summer” is not going
very well so far, but they are bound to get it right one day.

Not to worry, however, because they now have an
outrageously expensive super-computer. Unfortunately, if you write a program to
print “two plus two equals five” you get the same result however super the
computer.

Imagine you settled down in your seat in a jumbo jet and
noticed a plaque on the back of the seat in front which reads “This machine
was designed with the aid of a super-computer. We did not know the values of all
the parameters, so had to guess most of them.” You would get off in a hurry.
Yet the world’s political and media establishment are asking you to gamble the
economic future of yourself and your descendants on just such a proposition.

Computer
modelling is one of the most powerful, yet dangerous, tools available to
mankind. To be useful it has to be hedged around with checks, tests and
precautions. Ruthless, politically-motivated, members of the new establishment
are not concerned with such niceties. They want your money and your acquiescence
and if it takes a (to say the least) dubious computer model to get them, so be
it.

Footnote: In an item above there is
reference to “The Sunday Times of
all places”. Well, it is time to say it again. Rod Liddle, one of its jesters
licensed to tell the truth, deals
nicely with the Met Office. A couple of pages later Martin Ivens illuminates
the latest trends in Government New-speak. Glimmers
of light in the darkness?

It
is now believed that solar activity has a real climatic effect, although smaller
than that produced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

This is a fine
example for collectors of the way believers operate by irrelevant, inappropriate
and unjustified insertions of their own views. The passive mood is used to imply
that the believers include everybody. There are more than a few of us who
dissent.

Incidentally,
browsing through Chambers Dictionary
(as you do) turned up a reference to the Milankovitch
Theory (that large oscillations in the climate are related to solar
radiation received by the earth). Interesting that a
name that merits inclusion in the standard dictionary has virtually
disappeared during The Censorship, even though The Climate is dealt with
obsessively and daily by the popular media!

In these pages we have frequently remarked that the British
experience should be taken as a warning of what could happen in the
USA
. Nevertheless, Americans have gone ahead with their own experiment in
authoritarian socialism. Typical of the phenomenon is hurriedly and ill drafted
legislation that puts power into the hands of minor and unelected officials. It
is an unfortunate characteristic of some people that such power goes to their
heads, and many of those in positions that once were intended to represent
servants of the people now come to regard themselves as the masters. In
Britain
much of the primary legislation comes directly from
Brussels
in the form of “Directives”, which are diktats, emerging from a secretive
bureaucracy, that have never been properly debated or received the benefit of
expert advice.

American politicians now have their own version of this
process, as exemplified by the bizarre goings-on that led to the House of
Representatives passing a
weirdly inapposite Climate Change Bill. The cost of the Global Warming Myth,
already staggering, is about to increase by
orders of magnitude, tantamount to economic suicide.

One of the many dubious claims of the proponents is that it
will create Green Jobs. This is a dysphemism for a new class of people living
off the taxpayer. A major sub-class is The
Snoopers. We had them in the
UK
during the post-war Labour Government. They were tasked with such duties as
preventing private enterprise. It was largely Winston Churchill’s successful
campaign against The Snoopers that brought that spendthrift Government to an
end. Nowadays opposition leaders are considerably less effective.

Now The Snoopers are back. They pry into our garbage bins,
secretly film us and employ covert agents to follow us (justified by legislation
originally promoted as being anti-terrorist). One couple were subjected to a prolonged
stake-out to check that they were living where they claimed to be and not
evading the equality rules in the educational lottery. A teenager was prosecuted
for allowing a toddler to discard a sweet wrapper. Fortunately, our judges still
have enough power to treat such cases with the
derision they deserve. What is not disclosed is how much this snooping
impoverishes the taxpayer, but it is not difficult to imagine the cost of
several weeks of secret surveillance. Also typical is the fact that the actions
in question were not even offences until the advent of New Labour Government. It
is not only a crime to want to select a school for your child (unless you are
rich), there are now so many new offences
that no one, even the lawyers, knows what is legal or illegal. There are
literally thousands of new crimes (including the Orwellian sounding enviro-crimes).
When the Government is enacting seven new laws every day,
without a semblance of proper debate, ordinary people are exposed to legal
hazards of which they are completely unaware.

These are the conditions under which the Gauleiters thrive.
Every citizen is threatened with the circumstances of Kafka’s Joseph K,
arraigned for crimes and misdemeanours unknown, and helpless in the face of an
all powerful officialdom. Furthermore, ordinary people are now encouraged to
become informers. Records show that 28 Gestapo were able to rule a million
people by the use of informers. Many people were wrongly arrested owing to
accusations motivated by malice or revenge. When journalists enquire about cases
like those mentioned above, the response always comes from someone called “A
Spokesman”, anonymous and unelected. There is no comeback if they get it
wrong. The ultimate insult is that the poor chumps they pick on have been forced
to contribute to the inflated salaries these officials command. One of the
greatest financial burdens carried by the poorer elements of society, such as
pensioners, is the dramatic inflation of local taxes.

Footnote: Cost of public sector
pensions is now £1.2 trillion - The
Times.

28/06/09

SOS to
the world

Please
do not lend any more money to this madman.

He has borrowed, taxed and wasted recklessly for a decade.
Not only his present victims, but their children and grandchildren face a
lifetime of onerous debt repayment. Simple debt is not the worst of it. There
are hire purchase commitments (Private Finance Initiatives) and, worst of all,
an unbelievable burden of gold-plated pensions for his ever-growing and
unproductive bureaucratic army. Yet all he can talk about is plans for further
spending (known in code as investment).

He is still wittering on about new
spending plans, which are just the old spending plans under
a new name. He accuses his opponents of planning spending cuts, which even
the least informed Britons now accept as inevitable and painful.

His public behaviour has now become so irrational that
there are genuine fears that he is pursuing a scorched
earth policy. Is he, like the probably mythical Nero, fiddling while the
nation burns? Or does he see himself as Samson about to bring down the temple?

Characteristic was the announcement, in the media and not
in Parliament, that the biennial spending review will
not now take place. Almost all independent economic commentators, including
the OECD, state that expenditure cuts are necessary and urgent. The Prime
Minister is either insane or monumentally deceitful to carry on as though none
of this is happening.

Previous failing governments have done the honourable
thing. The Callaghan Government made
the necessary cuts and met defeat as a result. The Major Government bequeathed
to Gordon Brown one of the most benign states of economy ever.

The theme song of the New Labour movement was “Things can
only get better.” Bit of an irony isn’t it? At least “Yes we can!” does
not offer any hostages to fortune (or, for that matter, incompetence).

The British are a comical people, but there is nothing that
brings this out more than the weather. A dusting of snow brings the transport
system to a shuddering halt, but what really gets them going is the prospect of
a bit of warm weather. Temperatures have reached 31C and could reach 33C. It is, of course, manna from heaven for the global
warmers, who have been having rather a rough time of it over the last three
years. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world countries, such as
Singapore
, manage to conduct a successful economy and keep the populace alive with such
temperatures as the norm.

Naturally the
Nanny
State
swings into full operation at such times. Mass fatalities are feared. We are
given detailed instructions on how to survive the crisis: the same instructions
they gave us last time, but we are not trusted to remember. As so often happens,
the correspondents
to the Telegraph have their finger on the pulse. This one was particularly
apposite:

The Met Office has no
business "telling" the old and vulnerable to stay out of the sun.
Their job is to get the weather forecast correct; nannying is the job of the
British Government.

The Met Office, naturally, is full
of it. They have been promising a dose of global warming for three years
and, as we observed, they are bound to get it right some
time.

One further innocent question: How much power have the wind
turbines been producing during this “crisis”?